Tips That Can Help YouTube Work For Your Business.

Many internet marketers have long appreciated YouTube and have realised that the medium could be a useful and valuable marketing tool.

These companies have already adapted their seo strategies to accommodate this. Other marketers, however, have been a little slower on the uptake, or have argued that they see no purpose for this video-streaming platform in their marketing mix. This is, at best, short-sighted. You Tube can be an incredibly valuable marketing tool for most businesses and brands. It’s already able to influence search engines and is capable of increasing rankings on these pages.

Still, some people remain to be convinced.

Well, how’s this then? Google has just announced the latest changes to its algorithm update. An essential part of this Panda update is to give video a push and use promoted video in the calculation for search engine ranking. What this means is that YouTube, and other video-streaming platforms, will play an increasing important role in how your business fares on the SERPs. So, for all you doubting Thomas’ out there, here are a few tips that might be worth adopting over the coming months. If you want to boost your search engine ranking, and improve your conversion rates, then, however, reluctant you may feel about it, embrace the change and join the video generation.

Closed captions.

Ok, so these aren’t anything new: in fact they’ve been around for some years now, but they can make a difference to rankings and brand recognition. The unfortunate thing is, not that many people use them, though the advantages are obvious when you think about them. Closed captions are beneficial and a real help to those with hearing impairments, as they provide a practical and useful visual aid. But there’s more to them than that. Closed captions offer a great opportunity for embedding content that will boost seo value. All text fields on YouTube are scanned by both the YouTube and Google search engines: the same applies to text used in closed captions. So if you include keywords and key phrases in video content, these will be picked up by searching internet users.

Don’t upload your videos and forget about them – keep them updated.

If you want to make your video content have an impact not just on YouTube, but on the search engines as well, then you’ll need to keep them updated. YouTube will rarely flag up old material, unless it has a special significance or reputation. YouTube likes new and fresh content, in the same way as Google does. So have a play with old video content and give it a tweak every now and then. Change the titles and descriptions, and add title tags and closed captions. Let YouTube know you’re an active user. This will give your content a greater chance of appearing in the search engine results.

Remember YouTube is a social platform too.

Normally when we think about social media platforms, we think about Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. For some reason we seem to forget that YouTube is a social media platform too. It’s a sharing site, with audience interaction at its heart: it’s just instead of joining in conversations, people share video content. So, if you want your business to be noticed, subscribe to other users’ content: comment about what they’ve shared and respond by video if necessary, particularly for videos that share your particular niche. Being an active user encourages engagement with your own content, and helps to spread awareness of your video content across the web.

Use Calls to Action.

YouTube Annotations are, strangely enough, not viewed as a useful feature. What’s often overlooked is how important they can be as a marketing tool. Annotations can be carefully placed in your internet video content to give viewers extra pieces of information, whether it’s a website URL, a link to another video or an important call to action. One of the biggest difficulties of using a video to market content is to then send traffic from that video to a desired location. By using calls to action in these annotations, you can make sure viewers get essential instructions and encouragement to go beyond watching your video, and get them to view your website, article or download.

Embed Your Videos.

A lot of people would argue that platforms like YouTube can be a distraction, and take users’ attention away from what is truly important to your business – ie your website or your blog. To some extent that’s fair comment. Yet, if people used the embedding ability that YouTube offers for video content, then this shouldn’t be a problem. This embedding ability lets users promote the video on their own websites and blogs, whilst retaining their existing audience. The thing to remember is that these embedded videos need to be site mapped on Google. This will tell Google that the video content is actually on your website. Doing this doubles the chances of your video being noticed: it draws the attention of the search engine to both the video content and your website.